The Poetry of Place: what a great name for an essay, a conference, or even, dare I say it, a blog. But what does this fine-sounding phrase actually mean? What, if anything, is the difference between the poetry of place and poetry about landscapes or scenery? To my very un-academic way of thinking, it has something to do with a kind of interdependency between a place (in the loosest possible sense) and a poem, poet, or group of poets. And I think there are two main ways it could be said to work.

The first of these is that a poet or group of poets is indelibly identified with a place; the place is what gives their work its impetus and significance. If the Lake District didn't exist, would the Lake Poets ever have achieved the literary status they did? Would so many tea-towels have been sold without those long walks in Cumbria? And speaking of Cumbria, has there ever been a writer who is more a poet of place than Norman Nicholson, who spent his entire life in the Cumbrian mining town of Millom, digging out a rich vein of verse? Whatever you think of the poetry of place, Cumbria is clearly a place of poetry.

John Clare is another poet whose name is inevitably linked with a single location, in his case Northamptonshire, and his poetry is informed by the life and speech-patterns of his fellow locals. Even in the United States, where social and geographical fluidity are such significant facts of life, a poet like William Carlos Williams can be read primarily as a New Jersey - and, of course, a Paterson - writer. His work grew out of the physical and linguistic environment of his home state. And Geoffrey Hill might be called a Mercian poet, even though Mercia no longer exists.

The relationship between WB Yeats and Coole Park raises an interesting question; is Yeats a Coole poet or is Coole (or rather the fact that so many people know about the place and continue to visit it each year) a product of Yeats' poetry? Which gives me a neat link to the second possibility; the poetry of place may involve a place becoming invested with the meaning a poet lends it. To take another Irish example, the Grand Canal in Dublin would, to the literary world, be just another inland waterway but for the efforts of Paddy Kavanagh. Or, returning to the Lake Poets, without Wordsworth's poem would Tintern Abbey be anything more than just another ruin? These are locations whose possible range of connotations has been expanded by the poets who wrote in and about them.

There are numerous examples of places that have been made somehow more "significant" by a poet. Think of Adlestrop and the chances are you'll think of Edward Thomas or, possibly, Dannie Abse. For me, Black Hawk Island on the Wisconsin River will always be a place that Lorine Niedecker brought to life, while the tiny Northumbrian hamlet of Briggflatts is the place Basil Bunting wrote about, twice.

One thing we can say for certain about places; we're all in one. So this week's challenge should be no problem. Be it a well-known spot with poetic associations, or a little-known location that has inspired you and you alone, your contributions to the poetry of place are more than welcome. Please place all poems here.